


Cat People

by Missy



Category: Burn Notice
Genre: Curtain Fic, Dog(s), Family, Humor, Multi, Pets, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-03
Updated: 2011-07-03
Packaged: 2017-10-20 23:58:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam, Mike and Fi definitely aren't cat people.  Neither is their daughter, who expresses her issues with her new baby brother by asking for a dog. (part of the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/149598">Better with Three</a> continuity.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cat People

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voodoochild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/gifts).



> This is the third part of the [Better With Three](http://archiveofourown.org/works/149598) continuity I share with voodoochild.

Sam knew they were in trouble when dogs started invading Claire’s drawings.

It wasn’t just a puppy, floppy-eared and attentive; it was a big brown-eyed golden retriever with a stick in its mouth, bounding up to its stick-figure mistress. There were dogs in planes, dogs eating Pop’s pot of chili, dogs with their heads on mommy’s knee as she packed bricks of C4.

Finally, Fiona and Michael – as sleep-deprived by baby Sammy’s midnight cravings as Sam was - noticed them too. Fiona had been nursing the boy by his bedroom window, Claire distracted by her outside playtime with Michael - when Sam showed her the latest batch. She raised an eyebrow at the picture. “Is that dog carrying a Luger?”

“It’s almost her eighth birthday….” Sam began, tucking a spit towel against his shoulder.

“So it is,” Fiona said, handing him the baby. Sammy let out a fussy noise and curled up against his father’s chest, and Sam started gently rubbing his son’s back. A small belch was followed by a large one, and Fiona’s nose wrinkled. “We do have enough land out back. But our jobs – we’ve got such strange hours….”

Sam chuckled. “I know what your problem is. You’re a cat person.” He bounced Sammy gently in his embrace.

“I am not a cat person,” Fiona declared, and she rolled her eyes at Sam’s overt ogling as she tucked her breast back into her top. “Back in Dublin I had two puppies of my own.”

“And you didn’t drown them?” Little Sammy let out a loud belch and a mouthful of spit-up down Sam’s collar.

Fiona pecked him on the cheek and took Sammy to his cradle. “The boy talks for us both.”

***

“We’re not getting a dog.”

Sam’s features wrinkled up at Michael’s pronouncement. “Geez, brother, way to Scrooge it up.”

“I’m not Scrooging anything up,” Michael said. “We can’t bring a dog into a life that already includes two kids, a mortgage and forty gallons of plastic explosives.”

“Maybe we could get a bomb-sniffing dog?”

“Sam,” Michael complained fondly, “You’re worse than Claire!”

“That’s what Fi said.” Sam’s eyebrow poked upward. “You’re saying Fi’s right about me?”

“Most of the time,” Michael retorted, kissing his lover’s chin. “I vote no.”

“What if me and Fi both say yes?”

Michael smirked, running his hand up Sam’s thigh. “I know how to change your minds.”

Sam gulped. Oh, he did. And if the kid was going to have her present, he’d have to work double-time.

***  
It was two days before Claire’s birthday, and Sam acknowledged to himself that they were running out of time. He and Fi had visited some reputable breeders on their own, but none of the dogs had caught Fiona’s fancy; they were too mannered, too carefully raised; she demanded chaos, it seemed, even from her puppies.

He rubbed Sammy’s back, listening to the child make soft squeaking sounds of contentment. Involuntarily, a smile came to his lips; this child was his flesh, biologically; had his eyes, which was his big tip-off. He definitely didn’t love him more than he loved Claire, but there was an instinctive biological understanding between them, because he was a boy, and because there was an Axe.

His peaceful thoughts were interrupted by the poke of a crayon against his boot.

“What, kiddo?” he peered down at Claire.

“I’ve been pokin’ you for ten minutes,” she exaggerated.

“More like two seconds.” He could play this game too.

She held up a white piece of paper. “I spent ALL DAY drawing this.”

Sam took it. “Well, let’s see…it’s very pretty…” He saw himself, recognizable by his rounded belly and black pockmarked stubble on his cheeks, holding hands with a heel-wearing Fi, a sunglasses-sporting Michael, Madeline with her cigarette, and Claire. They were standing next to a large golden retriever, a house, and an elephant with brown eyes carrying a gun.

His eyebrow rose. Dear Abby never prints suggestions for parents whose children persist in drawing their brother as an elephant. “Why’s Sammy got a trunk?”

“Because he’d be really happy as an elephant,” she said nonsensically. “And then you’d only have to go bring him hay every day, and you’d see ME, not him.”

Sam winced. “Is that why you’ve been asking for a dog so much?”

Claire pouted. She was so much like Fiona emotionally, so much like Michael physically. “You like Sammy better than me. He’s YOUR baby.”

Sam’s heart sunk. With his free arm, he grabbed Claire around the waist, lifted her up, and tucked her onto his knee. “Never, ever doubt that I love you, darlin’,” he said with force. “You and me’re blood, and we always will be.”

She leaned into him, rubbing her cheek into his chest. She seemed so little, and vulnerable, so Sam squeezed her even harder. “Love you, pop.”

“You too, baby. Always.” Sam knew then – as he’d always known – that Claire and Sammy would be first in his heart, even more important than Mike and Fi.

**

They found the dog in a meth house with a broken paw, and naturally it (soon to be he) gravitated right toward Michael. He would, in the near future, sit at the ex-spy’s foot most nights and beg for scraps from their dinner table.

It had been a successful bust, if one that had left Michael with a black eye and Sam missing a molar. Fiona was the one who had found the Jack Russell cowering and underweight in the corner, peering up out of a cardboard box.

“He looks sick,” Fiona muttered. She had pulled him out of his box, and the thing had crawled into her lap and she was rubbing his belly.

“Fi…” Michael began. “It looks like a rat…”

“It’s a dog.” Fiona’s sharp voice refused argument.

“We should drop it at a shelter.”

“I dunno Mike – he looks pretty sick.” Sam was down on his knees, scratching the pup’s head. A sandpapery tongue lapped Sam’s palm.

Michael glanced from one face to the other. The puppy squirmed off of Fi’s lap, walked a circle around Michael’s foot and rested its head on his expensive Italian loafer. “Please tell me you know a black-market vet we can use.”

“I do know a guy who knows a guy who knows a vet,” Sam declared. “He’s not black market – he’s legit.”

“I don’t care,” Michael said. “Just get him on the line.”

Fi scratched the top of the pup’s head. “Claire is going to be so happy.”

“The only thing that’d make her happier would be her brother turning into a puppy.”

Michael eyed Sam as he dialed. “That’s not an option.”

“Honestly, Michael…” Fiona began. She’d picked the puppy up in her arms and was holding him, gun tucked into the belt of her dress.

***

So that was how Team Westen-Axe-Glenanne got its seventh (and, in Sam’s words, hopefully last) team member. Claire was over the moon for her puppy, and he spent much of his fifteen years on the planet wearing doll dresses and plastic machine guns, happily curled up in her arms.

Naming rights went to the person who had rescued him; Sam’s veterinarian friend. He squinted at the puppy, smirked, and said, “Sam, buddy, it’s pure folly that you found him.”

And so Folly he was called, a name that proved especially apropos when he chased Hummers and tried to romance the neighbor’s plastic gnomes.


End file.
